The workplace of the future (which means you start now) is completely dependent upon workers’ ability to find the most important things at the right time, and put those things together with the best people to solve problems.
The line between who works directly for a company, and who is a vendor, partner or other support entity, will become less relevant as all of these potential problem solvers can find the same company information at the same time.
I suppose that statement scares people who like the idea of a company commitment to a full time employee. But I say that traditional employment situations already look really different, and the location, time and space when you think about “work” is changing every day.
Mindless work is being replaced faster and faster by systems that can do repetition better than humans, such as checking for data updates a zillion times a day. That leaves the humans free to put data together in creative ways to make decisions, and then quickly move on to think about how to solve the next problem.
Today, the “user interface” of the typical workplace is stilted by a lack of connected information. Many of us still have to call or email someone asking how to find something, and then wait for an answer. Information in the future will find us by automating the connections between systems; checking our calendar for meetings and people, calculating data similarities to indicate trends, and studying information coming from vendors, partners and internal data streams, for data and people that may be important to the current problem we are trying to solve.
What today is a disparate set of systems all generating data in isolation will become data that is interconnected. Businesses will come up with clever methods to analyze the massive amount of data coming from social platforms, email, sensors in the workplace and mobile devices, to increase workforce effectiveness.
This concept of interconnectedness is overwhelming to many people, and may feel like a money pit to executives. But, as with most new ideas, it is most effective to implement, if you start small and set clear goals on what business effect you want to see from each development cycle.
For example, if your main concern is distributing video, there are now a couple of good systems that make ingest, storage and distribution fast and relatively simple. However, think about how that distribution system will report information about what it is doing to other systems in the company. How do you make sure the legal department’s licensing contracts are followed? Would your accounting department like to know when videos reach your company’s distribution partners so they can invoice faster? Would your finance department be able to put together more accurate projections on revenue if they could easily see the correlation between product development and worldwide distribution time? Would your marketing team benefit from seeing correlation between distribution and social media response from viewers? Perhaps your merchandise folks might understand why certain products suddenly see an uptick in sales if they can see when a related video product is released to the public.
All of these data points are most likely tracked and stored in disparate company systems today, but the business of the future will require that ALL data is correlated in creative ways for human analysis and much quicker action.
Do you have questions or observations you would like to share about your (current or potential) DAM development? Use the comments section below or email your question to ckingDAM(at)hotmail.com and I will address those questions here in coming blog articles.